More Customer Channels: Your Biggest Pain Point Is NOT What You Think

Meeting with Cameron Weeks from Sharpen at ICMI’s Contact Center Expo was a bit of a twist from the norm. And personally, I like that. Hearing a unique message and perspective on a common contact center topic (and solution) such as omni-channel was an inspirational change of pace.

Too often the inside view on contact center technology is about cost reduction and Customer Experience. However, the reality is that if agents and supervisors are given a difficult to use set of tools it negatively impacts the customer experience and costs more to use.

Call Quality, Ease of Use, Reliability and Speed are much more than Customer Experience needs, they are Agent Experience needs.

And with 92% of customers reporting that an agent’s perceived mood affects their experience, not having an agent- focused omni-channel solution could be your biggest pain point of all. what you need to improve the Customer Experience most.

Here is an edited transcript of our interview:

Jim Rembach: Hey, this is Jim with the Fast Leader Show and Call Center Coach and I’m here with Cameron Weeks from Sharpen. Cameron how do you help folks get over the hump?

Cameron Weeks: Yeah, we really focus on the Agent Experience side of the contact center. Something we think has been neglected and forgotten for quite a while.

Jim Rembach: Now when you say Agent Experience – but wait a minute, you’re a platform company. What do you mean by that?

Cameron Weeks: Sure, we didn’t believe when we started the company that we could really help our customers by just focus on Agent Experience but that it had to be a holistic system that the touched every piece of the contact center. So, it’s Agent Experience but really strong routing, Workforce Management, Workforce Optimization, at global scale. So, it’s all the pieces together but all those pieces working together to solve the idea of improving agent experience.

Jim Rembach: So, it’s been awhile since I actually heard the terminology and you had to remind me but tell me a little bit about MOS Score and what that means.

Cameron Weeks: Yeah, so MOS Score is a calculation to measure call quality over the internet. It’s been around since VoIP was established. Sharpen’s really proud of this that looking through 2017 and the first quarter of 2018 that our average Global MOS Score was 4.4. Meaning perfect call quality on average anywhere in the world.

Jim Rembach: So, we know that in a contact center the frontline supervisor is a critical role. They are a linchpin that kind of puts a lot of things together and make things happen. How do make their lives easier?

Cameron Weeks: We think that the world actually kind of made their lives harder versus easier in the last couple of years.

By leveraging machine learning to automate interactions with customer’s by removing those really easy questions that chatbots are able to solve for, it kind of put more stress on agents and supervisors. And so, we think that machine learning is really positive customer service but maybe implemented wrong to start with.

And so, we use it internally before reason externally. The idea here is that we can leverage machine learning to automatically identify interactions that have coaching and training opportunities inside of them. And then send those up to supervisors without having to dig through reports and excel spreadsheets finding information that might help their agents be more successful.

Jim Rembach is recognized as a Top 50 Thought Leader and CX Influencer. He's a certified Emotional Intelligence practitioner and host of the Fast Leader Show podcast and president of Call Center Coach, the world's only virtual blended learning academy for contact center supervisors and emerging supervisors. He’s a founding member of the Customer Experience Professionals Association’s CX Expert Panel, Advisory Board Member for Customer Value Creation International (CVCI), and Advisory Board Member for CX University.

[03/28/2019]
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